»
African Dinosaurs

X FRICA HAS BEEN shaped and molded for eons by the global processes of plate tectonics and continental drift. One result is that it has a string of great lakes running across the eastern side of the continent. Lake Malawi is tin' southernmost oi the string Figure 10 . It is the third largest and second deepest. In Africa, only Victoria and Tanganyika surpass Lake Malawi in area. Only Tanganyika is deeper. Ranked among the other lakes of the world, it is the thirteenth largest, but it is the...

Tied within the earth for millions of years, a fossil exposed on the surface can be pitifully fragile and easily lost. Fossils come and go on the surface of the ground through the processes of erosion and weathering. In tropical Africa it does not take long for fossils to be destroyed. To me, worrying about fossils lost to nature is sort of like the sound of a tree falling in the wilderness If there are no eyes present to find a bone, it might as well not exist. The resiliency of a fossil...

The beginning of the field season. I am on my way from the United States to Africa, It is 5 48 in the afternoon, I am aboard Delta Flight 26 en route to Frankfurt, From there it is south, a brief transit stop in Johannesburg, then ultimately on to Malawi, I have two back-to-back overnight flights, one seven hours, the other fourteen, On this one the seats are filled on either side ofme, There is not much to do on an airplane, especially on an intercontinental flight,...

BEG TO DRAW your attention to Africa. Those are the words of the missionary David Livingstone. He was trying to focus the eyes of the nineteenth-century world on the interior of the Dark Continent. He wanted to develop the economic potential of its downtrodden slaving grounds as a means of saving it. One of those who followed Livingstone in his mission was Henry Drum-mond, an influential Scottish theologian and scientist. In 1883, ten years after Livingstone died, Drummond conducted a brief...

T HIS BOOK is about fossils and about Africa. Thanks to the generous support of the National Geographic Society, most of it is based on my experiences and field work excavating fossils on the African continent. But it is about more than bones dug from the Earth. It is also about the people of Africa and how their legacies have shaped their lives. And it is about how such a thing as an expedition to find the ancient bones of the past can be put to The fossils in this book are those of dinosaurs...

THEY NO LONGER breathe, but five skeletons from Te nda guru Ken-trosaurus, Dryosaurus, Dicraeosaurus, Elaphrosaurus, and the noble Brachiosaurus can be seen today at the Museum fur Naturkunde on public display in what was formerly East Berlin. They were all once alive and members of the same community. What else could have been living with them With so many dinosaur bones, there had to be small animals as well. And in fact there were. The Germans collected a number of animals besides dinosaurs...